Tuesday, 31 August 2010

An study of the industry showed that the majority of dancers were attracted into the profession by the money, with all the women interviewed having finished school and gained some qualifications.

Actually, what I’m looking for is a lap dancer with a college degree and big tits. Or, come to think of it, one with big tits even without a college degree. So, overall, it’s mostly the big tits thing, I guess.

The General Motors IPO, the second largest ever, is arguably this decade’s most hyped financial event. But it might also turn out to be this decade’s biggest financial fiasco. Its timing is driven not by the financial needs of the company-- or the interests of taxpayers who are poised to get royally screwed--but the election-year needs of the Obama administration.

The IPO will allow GM to sell a part of the government’s share to investors on the open market. But floating an IPO now is the Bush administration equivalent of declaring “mission accomplished” after two months in Iraq.

[...]

Investors might overlook this if the company were otherwise sound and on a growth trajectory. That, however, is not the case. Indeed, in its application to the Securities and Exchange Commission--which, guess what, will come through just in time to make an IPO possible before the November elections!--GM admits that its “disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting are currently not effective.” And this “could materially affect our financial condition and ability to carry out our business plan.” Companies include all kinds of outlandish mea-culpas in their IPO applications to cover their derrières in the event of investor lawsuits. However, this one goes to the heart of the information that investors need to determine whether GM is a good investment, especially since it is going public after only two good quarters as opposed to the usual four. If GM can’t guarantee its own numbers, how exactly are investors supposed to evaluate its worth?

Andrew Breitbart offered $10,000 to anyone with video of Congressmen being called “niggers” over their impending health care votes. The absence of claims buttresses a substantial video record showing no epithets.

Now comes a leftist offering $100,000 for evidence of Glenn Beck’s misbehavior, followed by the rapid scrubbing of the post from the leftist website where it was offered. The site publisher correctly understood that anyone with such evidence could easily get $100,000 in today’s market, no offer was needed. Soliciting such evidence only highlights its unavailability, and strongly suggests it doesn’t exist at all.

The man who wasn’t good enough in Chicago to educate Obambi’s kids—but is good enough to educate yours—promotes an open racist using government resources:

President Obama’s top education official urged government employees to attend a rally that the Rev. Al Sharpton organized to counter a larger conservative event on the Mall.

“ED staff are invited to join Secretary Arne Duncan, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and other leaders on Saturday, Aug. 28, for the ‘Reclaim the Dream’ rally and march,” began an internal e-mail sent to more than 4,000 employees of the Department of Education on Wednesday.

Is a chief executive’s job 19 times more valuable than that of the US president and hundreds of times more valuable than the average worker in his or her company?

Such comparisons might seem invidious to high earners such as Larry Ellison of Oracle, who made $85m last year – according to Equilar, an executive pay research firm – or Ray Irani of Occidental Petroleum Corp, whose $31m pay last year triggered shareholder unrest.

But company chiefs are set to face a fresh wave of unflattering publicity over the many multiples of their average employee’s take-home pay that they deem themselves to be worth.

Not to be confused with a little-known codicil in the Faber College constitution!

... will force companies to disclose regularly the ratio of the median annual pay of all their employees to that of their chief executive.

Americans have been making such comparisons for years, when they read about the salaries of ballplayers and movie stars. They understand that they can’t hit like Albert Pujols and don’t look like Demi Moore. I think most of them understand they can’t run a Fortune 500 company.

As to comparisons with Obambi, let me quote Babe Ruth on this matter: Most of them have “had a better year.” (Via Drudge.)

Dutch investigators on Tuesday questioned two Detroit-area men arrested at Amsterdam’s airport after U.S. authorities found suspicious items in their checked luggage, including a cell phone taped to a Pepto-Bismol bottle and a knife and box cutter.

Alternative explanation: The Pepto-Bismol was in case he got “the runs” while traveling and the cell phone was so he could call a doctor in case he got “the runs” really, really bad.